Over the weekend, Lyndon Unger posted a tremendous article that lays a fairly good debunking on the “John-MacArthur-is-attacking-the-extreme-fringe-people-in-the-charismatic-movement-he-needs-to-interact-with-Carson-Fee-Grudem-Keener-and-the-vast-majority-of-sound-thinking-charismatics” narrative that has popped up since the Strange Fire conference. Phil and John even mentioned it at the Q&A Sunday night.
What Lyndon did is to consider the twitter accounts of both the so-called sound-minded charismatic, continuationists and the so-called wacko individuals who are outright heretics, and count the number of followers for each account. It is not meant to be an exact, scientific statistical analysis, because certainly there are many factors in play to skew data. However, it does demonstrate the profound, deep influence those of the heretical variety have in the broader world contrary to the shrill complaints of the so-called “sound” charismatics.
Read his initial post and commentary (comments are good, too) and then his follow-up post a day later. Both of them should provide Steve Hays enough material for like 100 smug rebuttal posts.
A Tiny Indicator of Charismatic Influence
Some Clarification on the Indicator of Charismatic Influence
hipandthigh 
Thanks for recognizing that it wasn’t any sort of concrete case, Fred.
I tried to make that clear, but most of the responses I’ve seen were “Paul Washer isn’t charismatic! HOW DARE YOU!” and “Judah Smith isn’t crazy! You’re an idiot!”
People confuse their imagined versions of their favorite preachers with reality…
Why didn’t JMac call Paul Washer out for his irresponsible view? We need an authoritative list of who is wrong on this doctrine so we know who the crazies like Washer, Piper, and Chandler are so we can stay away from them and not encourage that nonsense.
Well of COURSE Fred would say that, Lyndon…didn’t you know that he’s secretly a Jesuit?
Dominican!
I just read that Paul Washer will teaching a weekend seminar in a few weeks at the Samara Center for Biblical training in Russia. SCBT is ministry supported by GCC and TMS. Any thoughts on that?
I’ll do one better than that. Washer was here at Grace Church a week or so before Strange Fire to lead a little conference for the Spanish department (he speaks fluent Spanish, as I understand it). He obviously knew where we stood on the issue, but came anyway. Though he may be a continuationist, it is like Lyndon stated in his post, he believes it on paper, but doesn’t promote it or practice it in real life.
Oh come now a Capuchin at the most!
Fred, do you know when the video of the Q&A at Grace Church will be up online?
Actually he is pretty adamant about it:
He isn’t real fond of the Spirit quenchers but he will speak where anyone let’s him.